In 1829,
D'Orbigny toured the area of southern
Buenos Aires and the mouth of the
Río Negro. There he collected words of the "Puelches', "
Aucas' and "
Tehuelches' —that is, in
Günün a Iajüch,
Mapuzungun and
Teushen, respectively—in the vicinity of
Carmen de Patagones, in a permanent settlement of linguistically heterogeneous groups. The French traveler, intrigued by the indigenous languages of the area, arrived at the tolderías and contacted some interpreters: "
In a tent of friendly Patagonians I found a woman named Lunareja who spoke enough Spanish as if to serve as an interpreter; belonged to the Puelche nation and was married to a Patagonian, so that I knew both languages equally, which was of the greatest use to me. I also knew Araucanian, but the notions of this language could be better transmitted to me by the Indians."In he includes some comments on which highlights pronunciation features, the use of the morpheme ya- prefixed to the parts of the body, the numbering system or the absence of gender markings on adjectives, as well as a list of words that compares with those of other languages of South America.
Studies of Gününa yajüch In 1864, Hunziker recorded a vocabulary and a collection of phrases from a language called Genakenn in the Viedma region. In 1865, the explorer Jorge Claraz traveled from south of Buenos Aires to Chubut being guided by individuals who spoke Gününa iajëch, collecting the names of places, words and sentences in his (
Chubut exploration travel diary) (1865–1866). In 1913, Lehmann Nitsche used the data collected by Hunziker and Claraz to create a comparative vocabulary of Tehuelche languages: (
The Chonan Linguistic Groups of the Magellanic Territories). In 1925, Harrington gathered words from bilingual Tehuelche speakers which he published in 1946 in (
A Contribution to the Study of the Gününa küne Indian), claiming that they called their language Gününa yájitch or Pampa. During the 1950s, Casamiquela collected vocabulary, songs and prayers from various elders, outlining a morphosyntactic analysis. In 1960, Ana Gerzenstein made a phonetic and phonological classification in her (
Phonology of the Gününa-këna Language). In 1991, José Pedro Viegas Barros outlined a morphosyntactic projection in (
Linguistic Clarification of Intercultural and Inter-ethnic Relations in the Pampas-Patagonian Region), and in 2005 he developed a phonological description in (
Voices in the Wind). Puelche is a
dead language.
Casamiquela released the first and last name of the last Puelche speaker: José María Cual, who died in 1960 at the age of 90. == Phonology ==